S-STEM Scholar Alex Hugenberg-Cox Blog

 We started lab again this week picking up where we left off after the summer. We have switched species to Deinococcus deserti for the reference gene and have also started working on the new desiccation project as well with the species Deinococcus pimensis.  We started with new samples of our bacterias as both of these samples were for the second project as opposed to the reference gene project, clearing for contaminations and inoculating in order to go into our pre-desiccation procedure with 24 hours of growth, as well doing the pre-desiccation procedures on a sample of deserti that had grown over the weekend and was intended for RNA isolation following 48 hours of desiccation. The next day 24 hour growth deserti was plated for 24 hours and 7 days of desiccation and 24 hour growth pimensis was plated for 24 hours, 48 hours and 7 days of desiccation .  Pre-desiccation procedures were as follows: In 1mL of media, suspend culture equal to OD=1, (3x) Centrifuge to pellet, remove supernata

  Week of 5/28 - Project Initiation During the first week of our summer research project, we focused on laying the groundwork for our experimental work. We began by preparing R2A and R2B media and discussing our project timeline and potential research directions. On May 30th, we inoculated our media with Deinococcus sonorensis from our freezeback, carefully incubating the cultures at 30°C.  Week of 6/3 - Experimental Setup Our plates showed Luteus contamination, prompting us to perform four-way streaking to isolate our cultures. We began developing our project conditions and created Google Drive folders to organize our documentation. On June 4th, we created dedicated Google Drive folders for project documentation and initiated our first desiccation experiment. This involved preparing 10µL dots from 24-hour growth, diluting samples in 500µL media, and inoculating a 24-well plate in triplicate. We also prepared a new plate of D. sonorensis for future experiments. By June 5th, we re